The independence debate in Scotland

Interviewing Alex Salmond, the man who wants to break up Britain

BAGEHOT is in Edinburgh. Yesterday afternoon I interviewed Alex Salmond, first minister of the devolved Scottish government and generator of a hundred headlines this week, as the man who wants to break up Britain.

My report for the newspaper is here. With apologies for a very long post, I thought some readers of this blog might like a fuller account of what the first minister said.

Mr Salmond, who led his pro-independence Scottish National Party to a thumping victory in the 2011 Scottish elections, is preceded by quite a reputation nowadays.

"The most talented politician in the British Isles," I was told by an academic, as I made some last-minute calls about the implications of Mr Salmond's declaration, earlier this week, that Scotland would hold a vote on independence in 2014. "A brilliant demagogue...slippery... a total opportunist," one of his political rivals assured me. Over coffee in London last week, a senior Labour politician urged me, with surprising passion, not to suspend my critical faculties when meeting Mr Salmond. Don't be lulled into thinking you are in a foreign country, and so cannot understand what he is up to. Ask him your toughest questions, urged the Labour grandee.

I met the first minister at his official residence, Bute House, an Adam mansion in Edinburgh's New Town. It was my first time inside, and—perhaps appropriately—the setting felt at once foreign and familiar. Charlotte Square, on which Bute House sits, strongly reminded me of Dublin. Inside, however, the look is of 10 Downing Street redux, down to the smartly-uniformed officers opening the glossy black front door, the slightly austere Georgian hall and the stern portraits of previous first ministers marching up the main staircase.

And Mr Salmond? A panda-like figure, round of form and face, he bustled into the room flanked by aides and his chief economic adviser. He seemed charming, combative, self-deprecating and swelled with pride, all at the same time. And that was just the first minute. He had just come from opening a new headquarters for Barclays Wealth and been mobbed by television crews, he joked. Had something just happened?

In his day, Mr Salmond has had some pretty harsh things to say about the British state and its economic treatment of Scotland. A fierce left-winger in his youth, before a more recent conversion to talk of Nordic, business-friendly social democracy, he once called the use of North Sea oil revenues by the British government "probably the greatest act of international larceny since the Spanish stole the Inca gold". He referred to Margaret Thatcher's Conservative administration in Westminster as a "government of occupation", on the grounds that Scots voted by a large majority against the Tories, and Mrs Thatcher in particular.

The British state is "fundamentally unattractive", he declared in 1988, when he was an effective gadfly in the House of Commons in London. Britain, he said, was unpleasant in its views towards foreigners and depressing in terms of the breakdown of social cohesion. As an idea, Britain was "declining and out of date".

Now, as head of a devolved Scottish government, hosting The Economist inhis Georgian drawing room (open fire, elegant sofas, fine plasterwork) he was on his most conciliatory form. Once Scotland gained its independence, its ancient friendship with the English would be "re-invigorated", he declared. Quoting a boyhood friend of his family from Linlinthgow, the town of his birth, he said that Scotland yearned to be a good neighbour, not a surly tenant. For too long, he sorrowed, a number of Scots had blamed everything that went wrong on perfidious Albion, in something of a culture of grievance. Surly, he said again, as if pondering the term. That is a good way of putting it.

Well hang on, I asked. What about him? What about the widespread charge that he specialises in policies designed to provoke grievances on both sides of the border? Take his policy of offering free university tuition to Scottish and European students, while charging English, Welsh and Northern Irish students thousands of pounds in fees. What about his recent demand for extra money for Scotland, to compensate his people for spending on the Olympics in London? His political opponents are convinced that his plan is to boost Scottish pride north of the border while provoking English rage south of it, I noted. He earnestly denied it, shaking his large head at the extraordinary nature of the charge.

With a referendum behind him, the government in London would find him a very reasonable negotiator, he said, with few red lines. Asked about sensitive issues, from Scotland's future currency to the fate of Britain's nuclear deterrent (currently based in Scotland), he combined soothing, friendly noises with a continuous, relentless flow of facts, figures and debating points. It felt a bit like interviewing a teddy bear driving a bulldozer. The tone was sweet reason itself. But there was no stopping him.

Mr Salmond had prepared a great slew of facts and figures, setting out why Scotland was in better economic shape than the wider United Kingdom. His government's chief economist sat on a sofa nearby, to provide further detail if needed. Mr Salmond was keen to share this good news. He argued that, if you include revenues from North Sea oil and gas, Scotland ran a current budget surplus in four of the last five years while the United Kingdom was in deficit each and every of those years. Include a geographical share of oil, goes another of his statistics, and Scotland's population share of UK net debt in 2009-10 is 46.3%, compared to 52.9% of GDP for the whole of the UK.

I fear I did not pursue these numbers very far. This appeared to disappoint Mr Salmond's entourage, who ended up just giving me all their figures afterwards in a briefing note. The chief economist slipped from the room, halfway through the interview.

The thing is, all the claims and counter-claims about whether Britain subsidises Scotland or vice versa are essentially questions of politics, not economics. Mr Salmond says 90% of North Sea oil and gas revenues belong to Scotland, relying on one interpretation of the maritime border that suits him. His opponents say that England has a claim to between a quarter and a third of the North Sea oil and gas fields, relying on different maps.

The Liberal Democrat cabinet minister for Scotland in the British government, Michael Moore, last year produced tables that are every bit as stern and important-looking as Mr Salmond's. But these show different deficit and surplus numbers for the same period. Mr Moore argues that Scotland has run deficits for years, even if North Sea revenues are counted. Indeed, he says: "If you had allocated every single penny of oil and gas revenues to Scotland over the past 30 years - a figure of £156 billion - then you would still fall £41 billion short of what both governments have actually invested in Scotland."

Still the numbers come. Mr Salmond told Channel 4 News last night that Scotland would take 8% of Britain's national debt, in line with its share of the wider British population, but would not take on any of the bad debts associated with the failed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), the Edinburgh-based bank which at one point grew to 250 times the size of the Scottish economy (with Mr Salmond enthusiastically egging RBS on in its disastrous plan to buy ABN-Amro, the Dutch bank). The British Treasury collected tax revenues from RBS and failed to regulate it properly, Mr Salmond explained, prompting Channel 4 News to headline its report "Salmond: you keep Scots bank debt, we'll keep the oil money".

Talk to English Tory MPs in London, and they grumble loudly about Scotland being subsidised to the hilt by Britain. In Stirling, on my way to visit the site of the Battle of Bannockburn yesterday morning, a local ranted at me that Scotland was sick of paying for Britain, and should seek its independence, just like Ireland and, um, Wales.

Whose numbers are right? I have no idea.

The bottom line, surely, is that an independent Scotland's future solvency cannot be separated from the negotiations that would follow a referendum vote for a split. Some broad arguments can be made about the merits of being a small country with a large banking sector, but when it comes to divvying up public debts, pensions liabilities, gold reserves and the like, everything would be up for grabs.

That being so, I decided to spend my hour with the first minister trying to pin him down on his political plans for that fight. I had only partial success, but did come away with a few, tentative observations about Mr Salmond.

1. Though he has devoted his life to Scottish politics (unlike the big beasts of the Scottish Labour Party, who still mostly flee to London to try their luck on the British national stage), Mr Salmond is strikingly keen to measure himself against other front-rank British politicians.

He talked, a lot, about George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer and chief electoral strategist of the Conservative Party, who is reportedly leading the tactical charge against Mr Salmond's referendum. Sometimes, this was to attack Mr Osborne as a foreign Tory interfering in Scottish politics. At other times, he boasted that "my old friend Mr Osborne" is "rather impressed" with policy innovations dreamed up by the Scottish government, such as the Scottish Futures Trust, (a clever wheeze for paying for public works). Mr Salmond is "not sure" Tory MPs would like to know that Mr Osborne was looking at SNP ideas, he added, grinning prettily.

Mr Osborne's tactical skills came up, again, in discussions of the independence referendum, and the row that now looms between Edinburgh and Westminster over when to hold such a vote, how to run it and, vitally, what question to put on the ballot paper (the British government wants a straight, yes-or-no, question about independence, Mr Salmond has dropped hints about adding on a second, fall-back option offering much deeper devolution, leaving only defence and foreign policy in British hands).

Unbidden, Mr Salmond drew a comparison with last year's Britain-wide referendum on whether to change the voting system used at Westminster general elections, during which the Conservatives soundly defeated their Liberal Democrat coalition partners. That's a complicated tale, but in essence the Tories opposed adopting the Alternative Vote (AV), while the Lib Dems campaigned in favour. The No camp backed by the Conservatives ran a pretty tough campaign, including personal attacks on the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg.

Asked to expand on this, the first minister argued that the Liberal Democrats had been "desperate" to change the voting system to their dream of full proportional representation (PR). Somehow, Mr Osborne "stitched up" his Lib Dem colleagues in government and managed to get them to agree to a referendum on something that wasn't PR, so the Lib Dems' own enthusiasm fell away. Then the Tories further undermined the case for change with ruthless campaigning.

He tried to look all shocked at the ruthlessness of Mr Osborne. But if I had to guess, I'd say he likes the articles popping up in the press this week, portraying the independence fight as a contest between two great political strategists, Salmond v Osborne.

2. When cornered on a hard question about Scotland, Mr Salmond likes to go global, and throw around all manner of obscure and clever foreign analogies. These do not always withstand close scrutiny.

For instance, a big important question about Scottish independence concerns the new country's currency. Mr Salmond used to want to join the euro as soon as possible. He has gone a bit quiet about this (funnily enough). So at least for a while, his new Scotland would use the pound. That inspires alarm in some quarters, as people wonder if it is really wise to reproduce, via a new currency union of Scotland and England, the same wizard-wheeze that lies at the heart of the euro-crisis, namely a monetary union without a political and fiscal union over the top. I put this to Mr Salmond.

Oh not at all, he said. The fundamental problem of the euro is about uniting wildly diverging economies, with very different levels of competitiveness: countries like Greece and Germany. Scotland and England are very similar, even if (twinkle, twinkle) Scotland is more competitive by some measures.

Hmm, I said. Are we not now living in a world that has learned a bitter lesson from the euro crisis, so that bond traders are much less likely to take things like sovereign creditworthiness on trust, and are much more sceptical about breezy assurances that economies are jolly similar?

Ah, the euro is just a bad comparison, he continued. A better analogy is Belgium and Luxembourg, and their currency union before the euro.

Hmm, I thought (for I am a sad geek of an ex-foreign correspondent who once covered the Luxembourg referendum on the ill-fated EU constitution, and interviewed various Luxembourgeois about their views of currency union, who told me how humiliating it had been in the days when the Luxembourg franc was basically the Belgian franc in drag and Luxembourg had no monetary independence at all). Hmm, I said, expressing some of that out loud, are you sure Scots would accept such limited monetary independence?

Mr Salmond was off, dancing and diving, explaining how much more credit-worthy Scotland would be, how modest its stocks of debt, and how restrained its borrowing. Well, hang on, I said, in this suspicious new world, assurances of fiscal rigour are out of fashion. Over in euro-land, people want binding debt brakes written into constitutions, and deficit rules policed by supranational judges. Would an independent Scotland accept legally binding debt and deficit rules as the price of sharing sterling?

"I'm in favour of a stability pact," Mr Salmond said. What does that mean, I asked. Binding rules? The first minister was off again, explaining how an England-Scotland monetary union was not like the euro, and how the great advantage of holding a referendum meant that after a clear vote, Scotland and England would be negotiating in an atmosphere of goodwill. Pushed one last time, he delivered the gnomic pledge: "We'd negotiate a stability pact appropriate for the circumstances."

Another big, tricky question is what to do about defence policy in the event of a break-up. Would Scotland leave NATO, I asked? Ah, replied Mr Salmond happily. SNP policy is that Scotland would not be in the command structures of NATO. That means it would be like Sweden or Ireland.

Well hang on, I found myself saying again. Sweden and Ireland are not members of NATO. They're members of Partnership for Peace, said Mr Salmond. Yes, but that means they are not members of NATO, I said. (It was that kind of interview).

To be fair, once we had stopped roving round the map looking for analogies, he was forthcoming about his plans for an independent Scotland's military posture. He drew my attention to the recent strategic defence review conducted by the British government to manage deep spending cuts. This, he said, would leave Scotland home to a rapid deployment force of between 8,000 and 12,000 troops, a single air base and a single naval base. That's the sort of scale of armed forces an independent Scotland would have, he explained, with the big difference that the Scottish public did not want weapons of mass destruction in Scotland (a reference to Britain's submarine-based nuclear deterrent, Trident, which currently operates out of the deep, discreet waters of a Scottish loch).

We are not going to be unreasonable about it, we are not going to say Trident must leave the day after independence, he went on. But it would have to leave.

What about American submarines and warships carrying nuclear weapons, would they still be welcome in Scottish waters? I don't envisage a boycott on visiting forces, of the sort that New Zealand had, he replied.

Would Scottish forces go to war with the armed forces of the continuity British government? We'd have sent them to Iraq in 1991 if asked to join the international coalition, he replied. We wouldn't have sent them to Iraq in 2003, to participate in an illegal war. Scottish warplanes could have taken part in the 2011 raids over Libya, because that air campaign had legal backing from the UN.

Would Scottish citizens now serving in the British armed forces have to leave? Not at all, said Mr Salmond. There are all manner of foreigners serving in the British armed forces, from Irish or Commonwealth troops to the Gurkhas.

We've done a lot of thinking about these things, Mr Salmond told me. We are not wanting to be upsetting or awkward. On the contrary, there will be lots of positives. Look at the relationship between Ireland and Britain, and how it has been enhanced by mutual respect. He checked himself. Scotland is not Ireland, he said carefully. Scotland was never an oppressed country.

But in general, went his message, the friendship between Scotland and England will be given new life by Scottish independence.

That leads me to observation 3, which seems to me to be a real point of vulnerability for Mr Salmond.

3. I think Alex Salmond is out of date when it comes to English nationalism, and the changing nature of Britishness as a form of identity.

I think his views of Britishness are a bit stuck in the 1980s, when he first sat in the House of Commons in Westminster. Back then, it is true that far-right fringe groups such as the National Front had aggressively adopted Britishness as their identity. Their slogans included: "There ain't no black in the Union Jack". As late as 1999, according to David Torrance, Alex Salmond's biographer, the SNP leader could be heard telling the BBC that Britishness had been claimed as an identity by thugs and racists, while Englishness was an "aristocratic, almost mediaeval concept."

If you stick to that view of the world, then promoting friendship between the good, honest folk of Scotland and the plain, decent people of England must look like a progressive act, liberating two ancient cultures from the moth-eaten baggage of imperialist, nostalgic, exhausted, embittered Britishness.

I have a hunch that is how Mr Salmond sees it. He has always been very careful to distance himself from the angrier forms of nationalism, and stress the idea of Scottish independence as an outward-looking, internationalist cause.

With that in mind, I asked him about the dramatic rise in anti-Scottish sentiment on the right of the Tory Party. Doesn't it worry you, I asked, that your strongest supporters at Westminster are the very people you most dislike: nationalist, Eurosceptic English Conservative MPs? There is a striking overlap between the MPs who want to quit the EU and those who want to kick out what they consider to be scrounging, subsidised Scotland.

I told him about the young Tory MP I knew from the 2010 intake, who confided to me that during the long slog of seeking a safe seat, the loudest cheer he earned at a selection meeting came when he was asked if he thought the Scots should be allowed a vote on independence. He had replied, blimpishly, that he wanted to know when the English might be allowed to vote on whether the Scots could stay. The cheers lifted the roof, apparently.

I would never judge the plain people of England by some views heard by foolish Tory backbenchers, Mr Salmond replied airily, adding that this was not too modern a phenomenon, either. In the House of Commons in the 1980s, he said he heard plenty about Scotland that if said about another country would be "deemed quite unacceptable".

But it is precisely that same breed of Tory MPs who are the loudest advocates in London of granting Scotland its independence, I insisted.

His face darkened. Do they mean it? he snapped, utterly unwilling to concede the point. They do not, he said. "They want to hold Scotland fast."

They don't, I retorted. They really want to kick you out. (It was that kind of interview).

Mr Salmond remembered his calm and soothing manners. Just as I have great faith in Scotland's hidden powers, he breathed, I have great faith in the English people to forge an English identity.

But it's more complicated nowadays, I suggested. Britishness is now the country's multi-cultural, inclusive identity. People talk about being British Muslims, or British Asians, in a way that they would never talk about being English Asian. Englishness is becoming mixed up with tribal grievance. If you see a St George's flag flying outside a council house in England, it is often a sign of protest and complaint. The union flag is not used by the far-right now, they use the English flag, I suggested.

What about Billy Bragg, retorted Mr Salmond, naming a left-wing singer and activist whose work explores the history of English political radicalism and popular protest?

What about the English Defence League, I said, naming a nasty far-right group that has made headlines in recent years?

Mr Salmond paused briefly before saying: people should reclaim their flag, and do it as quickly as possible.

Later, he returned to the theme. You say Britishness is a less tribal identity, he said. But isn't one of the great successes of modern Scottish identity that it is non-exclusive? People can be Pakistani Scots. Mr Salmond quoted a famous line from a Thatcher-era cabinet minister, Norman Tebbit, who asserted that immigrants could not consider themselves British as long as they supported a foreign team at cricket. No Scot would be asked to pass a Norman Tebbit cricket test, Mr Salmond said firmly.

For a nimble man who has changed his political arguments at dizzying speed over the years, whenever circumstances required it, I think Mr Salmond is a bit stuck on this one. His sense of Scottishness as a generous, open-hearted, authentic identity seems partly defined as a rejection of a closed, pinched Britishness that carries a powerful 1980s whiff.

Mr Salmond knows his Scottish politics, better perhaps than any other front-rank politician in his country right now. But I think his understanding of Britishness, and Englishness, is oddly out of tune with the present.

Perhaps this does not matter. He only needs to win the votes of Scots in 2014 to win his referendum. But English opinion seems to matter to him. Later this month he is coming to London to deliver a Hugo Young lecture on how an independent Scotland may prove a stirring example for England. I wonder if he will be surprised by who cheers his message, and who is cast down by it.

What a petulant, patronising, outpouring. Why is it that the independence debate is suddenly arousing such anti-Scottish fervour?

Was this supposed to be a profile of a politician?

So what did you think of the man and his intellect?
"A panda-like figure, round of form and face, he bustled into the room"
"shaking his large head"
"It felt a bit like interviewing a teddy bear driving a bulldozer."

And what did you think of his economic argument?
"Mr Salmond had prepared a great slew of facts and figures"
"I fear I did not pursue these numbers very far"

So your idea of a political profile is to attempt to turn someone into a cartoon character and fail to give an analysis of the research that backs up his policies.

What a pitiful blog. High on the usual tripe we get when arrogant patronising English visit Scotland and think they are being clever. Yet another Englishman who thinks the universe rotates around England and everything the Scottish Government done is done with annoying England foremost in mind. Do you really think the Scottish Government looks after its students, its elderly and sick better than England does in order to annoy England.

To give you credit you have at least moved out of London for a day to pontificate on Scotland.

If you want to know about the fiscal position of Scotland vis-a-vis the UK I suggest you look at GERS 2009-10. Why live in ignorance when you can find out the facts. Scotland contributes 9.4% of all UK taxes and gets back 9.3% of all UK spending. Scotland's deficit (the first for at least 4 years, following the global meltdown) was £14 billion - 10.6% of GDP. The UK's fiscald deficit (with 100% of North Sea oil revenues) was £156 billion - 11.1% of GDP. Scotland's fiscal position is healthier than the UK's and has been for some years. No one subsidises Scotland, least of all the rest of the UK.

This article has a bit of a petulant whiff about it. Outgunned by our Mr Salmond were you? Seems so.

What were you expecting? Brigadoon and a bunch of yokels that wouldn't look out of place as extras in Local Hero? People that you can sneer at to bolster your metrocentric prejudices?

But instead you get a competent leader (far better than any other leader in Europe at this time), leading a competent government who has a political position (Scottish independence) that is backed up by cold facts and hard statistics rather than the extant mythical whinges from south of the border about subsidies and banks, deep fried mars bars and Irn Bru.

So Scotland has a lower fiscal deficit than England and would have a better debt to GDP ratio on independence - and this is backed up by facts rather than opinions or prejudices. Most people in Scotland already know that.

With respect to RBS and HBOS, as I have pointed out previously, the owners of these banks were largely "City" investment banks, funds and financial institutions. All of which were pushing from growth and the acquisitions which felled those institutions.The owners of these banks were not "Scotland" or the "Scottish people" collectively.

As I have also pointed out previously, the Corporation tax revenues of these banks in the good times, did not flow to Scotland. The assets of these banks were never credited to Scotland (and rightly so, as they were multinational in nature and structure). It is therefore, extremely inconsistent to apportion all of the liabilities to Scotland. You can't claim all the revenues, profits and assets of these banks for the English when it suits you and then dump all of the liabilities on Scotland when it goes wrong. That is, essentially, the crux of your argument.

Orkney and Shetland want nothing to do with Scotland, yet both voted for devolution in the 1997. The SNP topped the list vote in Orkney in the 2011 Scottish Parliamentary election and came very close second in Shetland. These are not example of such places wanting to have 'nothing to do with Scotland'.

is a good example of the argument over the Anglo-Scots maritime border. As we can see, there isn't much to negotiate. Well over 90% of Scotland's oil resources are in Scottish waters (and the oil is mostly landed there - Cruden Bay, St Fergus, Flotta or Sullom Voe). Any negotiations with England would only be at the margin. If anything, the proportion of North Sea resources the Scottish Government uses in its fiscal analysis is an underestimation.

England doesn't really have much industry or manufacturing - and any good examples of industry (ie defence and aerospace) are suckled firmly to the teat of public subsidy (in other words, the soft subsidies you previously mention). These industries are not really sustainable if let to pure market forces. Much other "industry" is either footloose, low skilled or foreign owned. Much of the "City" is also foreign owned, controlled and run. These again, are facts.

Scotland is in a good position. It has a strongly diversified economy - far more diversified than England or the UK as a whole. It has an energy surplus and is an energy exporter. It has a hard working, enterprising people. It has a better set of fiscal accounts than England or the UK. I don't know why many English people find these facts upsetting. We Scots only want independence to help us to better our country. It is not about England, it is about Scotland and it is pure self-indulgence to suggest otherwise.

Fine. I will ignore the personal abuse, and instead look at what you said.
The UK's bailout of Ireland was voluntary, the nature of the ownership of Ireland's banks was irrelevant. you could have found this out with a simple google search.
Most of the UK's debt is secured against assets held by financial institutons, you cannot simply compare it to (e.g.) Italy's large unsecured sovereign debt (UK's unsecured debt is comparatively low). This is basic finance.
'Europe's technocrats', and I assume you mean the ECB, cannot take over a country or even influence it unduly if it is not in the eurozone - that was neatly proven by Cameron's veto. Your point is idiotic.
The UK (NOT England) has a AAA rating for many reasons, not least of which is a long history of full repayment and control over its own currency. Something England will continue to have, but an independent Scotland will almost certainly not. Oil income is too small to make much difference, and if you had bothered to read the recent S&P press release confirming the UK's AAA, it made no mention of oil whatsoever. You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.
Any mention of empire or 'superpower' is just pathetic, an irrelevant sneer.
The only fear of Scottish independence that most people have is that they are aware that the nationalists are playing a very dangerous game. Salmond et al are torturing the stats to try to show that it is feasible while criminally underestimating both the extent of Scotland's subsidies and the costs of setting up all the necessary mechanisms and offices of state that are currently coved by the UK. If it goes wrong, and it probably will, then the UK (e.g. 90% England) will have to pay to put it right.
FYI since you mention it - the trident missile subs in Scotland secure thousands of local jobs, paid by the UK, that England would love to have back, and are an excellent example of the soft subsidy that Salmond is 'forgetting' to include.
You were right about HBOS vs RBS, I got my bankrupt Scottish banks confused.
Lastly, your posts (and others) highlight the true problem here - that Scotland has a problem with hate. Your drivel about national identity is purely subjective bigotry. Salmond, nasty little troll that he is, has tapped into this bigotry and is using is for his own megalomaniacal agenda.
It is this reason that I changed my mind - I hope Scotland does sever all ties with England permanently, not this half-arsed 'devo max' blackmail. It might be the only way to lance the boil of Scottish anglophobia, and save the English a fortune. Most of the English seem to be coming to the same conclusion.
You can have the final word, your anger will demand it.

I thought this was an insightful article - and I agree with the authors views on 'Britishness' - it has evolved considerably from the'80s and is far more of a value based identity, rather than an imperial, nationalistic one.

But I think the author could have left out the observations on Alex Salmond's character. His ability as a politician and quality of his arguments are what matter - the authors views on his personality are not really relevant.

Tip of the hat to Mr. Salmond, and congratulations to the Scotts for the upcoming referendum. As a Catalan that wants independence for Catalonia (as do 53,6% of Catalans according the the newest poll), and is afraid of the antidemocratic tradition of the Kingdom of Spain, a tip of the hat to the democratic tradition of UK and its citizens.

Figures can be conjured out of thin air to show white is black and up is down. Who cares. In this case, the real issue is politics, and how the people of these two nations feel about each other...

On the one hand, you have the people of Scotland who feel unheard in Westminster, and lacking their material dues. In England, people resent a neighbour who seems to take out of proportion with their size, and because of the nature of the country (large distnaces, sparse population) requires outsized subsidies.

As someone who has lived in both London and Edinburgh, I can say that London is by far the more inclusive place - an Arab friend of mine routinely received racist abuse from white scots. As a foreign friend said to me recently, I would enjoy visiting Scotland, but not to do business if it was out of the UK.

The two countries need to learn to love each other as neighbours, and equals. Indepenedence is not the solution, simply being honest and treating each other fairly is.

An interesting post but it would have been good to use the space to give a fuller transcript of Mr Salmond's answers and leave the 'colour analysis' to the end. As it is, the earlier commenter's remark that this reeks of post-hoc justification by an overawed interviewer seems on the nail.

The real question is not whether Mr Salmond is very clever, or even whether Scotland does or does not benefit fiscally from the Union (clearly, in the past it has: maybe not so much now). No, the real question is: do a majority of inhabitants of Scotland wish to stay part of the UK, grumbling from the side (as it appears to this Englishman) or would they rather be an independent nation.

Suggestions that a nation of 5 million cannot survive in the modern world are laughable. There would be at least 8 smaller Member States in the EU alone. For me, the major problem following possible Scottish independence is the danger to England (for Wales and Northern Ireland would surely insist on a looser federal structure as a minimum) of a permanent Tory majority that would effectively disenfranchise the Northern half of the country. But no doubt parties and structures would evolve to adapt to that.

As a non-Brit I think you are ill-informed about these bailouts. HBOS is actually headquartered in England. "Provided by England to Scotland" ? You seem to forget that people from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland also contribute to the bailouts. Not only RBS, but also "English" banks such as Northern Rock and Lloyds Bank have been bailed out by British taxpayers.

Nevertheless, I wonder who would bail out HSBC, if it would get into trouble. Britain ? Hong Kong ? China ?

JackKessler wrote "and what will you be able to do when enormous China and India come to call, or to bully -- that is what your international friends, some of us your very good friends, are asking about both of you now."

Quite right. Not to mention being bullied by a self-serving USA and a Europe that has lost its patience with Britain and has pretty much given up trying to be constructive. But the small minded extreme nationalists in both countries are more interested in parochial matters. Whether they are allowed to sell bent cucumbers or not would be an example that enrages Daily Mail readers. Whilst elsewhere, the big global powers agree the rules of the global economy and societies.

But the less extreme nationalists - Cameron and Osborne - who hold power at the moment do see the bigger picture and are intent on keeping the UK together. Though in a small-minded way they are doing exactly the same thing with the Britain-Europe relationship as Salmond is doing with the Scotland-Britain one. i.e. trying to get out so they have more say at a lower level at the expense of any say over high-level decisions that really matter.

If the main driver of Salmond's anti-Britishness is his dislike of Thatcher's Britain as seems likely, it is perhaps understandable given his formative experiences in the 1980s in London. But its a pity since the country has moved on. Though several of Salmond's opponents in the current Tory party such as William Hague and others are a direct product of Thatcherism too.

It will be ironic if the major legacy of Thatcherism is the break up of the United Kingdom. But perhaps historians will say that it was obvious that the seeds of the UK's implosion were sowed in those callous years of unnecessary extreme austerity when British industry and regional prosperity was pretty much wiped out to reduce the influence of labour. Perhaps Thatcher and her heirs are the major root causes of the break up of the UK. Who can blame Scotland for not wanting to risk being subject to that again.

Scotland will eventually regain its full independence. It is simply a matter of when. As a Scot I look forward to the day when we can take our place in the modern world with confidence, and as a good beighbour of England. I can't be bothered with narrow-minded people on either side of the argument. It is a statistical fact that Scotland has been subsidsing England to a relatively slight extent over the past few years (Andrew Hughes Hallett, world renowned economist has detailed the figures) but for me it is more a matter of self-respect. I do find it rather strange that the Tory party are among the most vociferous when it comes to keeping Scotland in the Union.This is the party which doesn't believe in subsidising anything but would have us believe they subsidise an entire country.As independent nations, Scotland and England can go their own ways and, I am sure, remain good friends.

'He argued that, if you include revenues from North Sea oil and gas, Scotland ran a current budget surplus in four of the last five years while the United Kingdom was in deficit each and every of those years.'

My god, he is a vile little man. After the £62 billion in bailouts provided by England to Scotland fr RBS and HBOS, you would have thought he would have turned down the sneering - but that would have been a rational response.
Scotland only manages to balance its books by dumping its crap onto the English, whilst making absurd claims about ownership of assets (half the oil is in the territory of the Shetlands and Orkney Islands, who want nothing to do with Scotland. England has all the gas).
England has most of the industry. Once the soft subsides that the nationalists conveniently ignore (all the UK wide government departments, naval ship building, military bases etc) are pulled out, there will be mass unemployment and huge deficits - even the oil lands in England.

Salmond is a arrogant, dangerous demagogue that will wreck Scotland to prop us his own megalomaniacal ego.

well - these blog comment debates on the Economist fall into three categories, I think -
the cool intellectual debate
the loonies playground
and like this one,
the rancorous personalised sniping and raking over old wounds characteristic of the end of a love affair....

International relations is a "soft power" world, now. So your point that a small population does not indicate inability to survive is well-made. My point was less about Scotland than about the remaining UK, though: that a nation unable to keep its pieces together will have trouble defining a foreign policy, or appearing to foreigners to have one. The EU has had this problem: monolithic China, looking for an EU position on issues, has been met with committees -- if the UK tries that, sending out foreign ministers with quarreling advisors from Scotland and Wales and where else, Belfast? Cornwall?, tagging along, British / English "soft power" will dissipate fast. Your point about a permanent Tory majority is well-taken too: the minister may need quarreling advisors from Yorkshire and the Midlands, as well. The grumbling can go on but the institutional crumbling has to stop.

In this blog, our Bagehot columnist surveys the politics of Britain, British life and Britain's place in the world. The column and blog are named after Walter Bagehot, an English journalist who was the editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1877. The blog is currently on hiatus after a change of Bagehot columnist.